Derrida's trace, "neither perceptible nor imperceptible," the
"re-marked place of a mark," pure taking-place, is therefore truly
something like the experience of an intelligible matter. The
experimentum linguae that is at issue in
grammatological terminology does not (as a common misunderstanding
insists) authorize an interpretative practice directed toward the
infinite deconstruction of a text.… Rather, it marks the decisive
event of matter, and in doing so it opens onto an ethics.

Language always occurs in the present because it makes the
present, because it's active.

—Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work (4)

Well After the End

When Walter Benn Michaels argued in The Shape of the
Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004) that the
social and political usefulness of poststructuralism had finally
expired completely, he was in plentiful company. Terry Eagleton had
likewise pronounced in 2003 that "the golden age of cultural theory
is long past" (1). Even Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi,
and Christopher Norris considered theory's aftermath in the
collection of interviews life.after.theory
(2003). And earlier than that, studies like Thomas Docherty's
monograph After Theory: Post Modernism / Post
Marxism (1990) and Wendell Harris's edited collection
Beyond Poststructuralism: The Speculations of Theory and
the Experience of reading (1996), among others,
addressed in various contexts theory's alleged decline. The "high
theory" of poststructuralism had long since run its course by the
time Michaels announced its dissolution into the "end of history."
And as its foundational authors passed away or slipped out of the
public limelight, the rhetorics and critiques of post-9/11
nationalism overwrote the political cachet of poststructuralism's
legacies in the public consciousness of the United States. Further,
a new set of European and American philosophers began or completed
their rise to ascendancy in the literary-theoretical wings of the
U. S. academy—Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Antonio
Negri, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek, to name a few—in the
decades immediately preceding and following the fin de
millennium. Whether or not one agrees with the theorists of
post-theory about poststructuralism's death in the institutions of
American literary criticism, we some time ago passed into a new era
in the history of continental thought's reception in American
academe.

But what is it about poststructuralist analysis that strikes
today's philosophers and literary theorists as incommensurate to
the task of living and thinking in a twenty-first-century global
landscape? One suggestion, to return to Michaels's condemnation, is
that poststructuralist theory has no room for ethical praxis. If
poststructuralism (albeit caricatured poststructuralism) tells us
that everything is text and that all texts are dependent on readers
for meaning, then theory undercuts the grounds for ethical behavior
by reducing meaning and belief to the isolated particularity of
individual subjects. At the so-called "end of history"—which is to
say in the age of fully globalized economic systems and floating
exchange rates—Michaels tells us, "the fantasy of the senseless
(writing without meaning) has taken its place alongside the fantasy
of Empire (politics without believing)" (182). In this account,
what has diminished is the political efficacy of espousing
skepticism about meaning and belief. In other words, globalization
has diluted the political potency of skepticism about normative
statements and causal narrative. And that skepticism, Michaels
would tell us, is shared by theorists of multicultural identity
politics, by literary critics steeped in Paul de Man, by authors of
metafiction and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, by queer theorists, by
feminists, by anyone, in fact, who interrogates how dominant
cultural narratives construct and maintain social reality.
Skepticism, Michaels suggests, cannot do ethics, cannot do
politics, and cannot read the world, let alone make it a better
place. Yet it has been blindly institutionalized as a "fantasy of
the senseless" in something like a fully late capital—or in the
really late postmodernism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
Empire (2000). Michaels's argument, reductive as
it may be, is also seductive because it recognizes the political
limitations of certain modes of reading (vis-à-vis both word and
world), as...

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